Blanchot and Mallarme
1990; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 105; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/2905160
ISSN1080-6598
Autores Tópico(s)French Literature and Criticism
ResumoMaurice Blanchot is undoubtedly one of France's most fascinating and influential literary figures, and it is for these qualities that his work as a critic is perhaps best known. In this paper I want to look more closely at one small, but nonetheless significant aspect of Blanchot's writing, his reading of the work of the poet Stephane Mallarm6. Indeed, to read Blanchot's literary essays or non-fiction, if I may be allowed the naive terms at this stage, is repeatedly to encounter not so much a repertoire of critical concepts as a configuration of proper names. The names are familiar ones: Kafka, Holderlin, Nietzsche, Rene Char, and, perhaps best known of all, Mallarm6 himself.' What these names have in common is that they recur in Blanchot's work with a certain force of repetition and excess. Each signs, for Blanchot, a text or a writing that enacts a moment of crisis in the exploration of the space of literature. But literature is not so much challenged as constituted in such moments of aesthetic questioning and doubt, and the source of the crisis lies less in the individual works of the authors Blanchot cites than in the exorbitant logic of literature itself, which such texts serve to exemplify or instantiate. Yet while the texts Blanchot names are in this respect paradigmatic, they display essential traits of literature without being themselves constituted as examples of anything other than themselves. As names in Blanchot's writing, they do not represent models to be emulated or norms to be followed. They are constituted rather as a series of singular protagonists in the
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